Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

In this article, I focus on primary entanglements as the co-materialization of the verbal and visual in contemporary literary handwriting. As we will see, this is a special kind of writing. It is a writing meant to be seen and engaged with as matter. It tends to be non-linear and almost completely illegible. We find such literary handwriting in the work of the French-Canadian book artist Louise Paille who copies or overwrites. Her artistic method is that she copies by hand complete literary works into second-hand books: textbooks, atlases, medical books, or books of literature. Once these literary works have been copied they are no longer (completely) legible, as are the books they have been written into. In this way, I show, by using the method of overwriting, Paille makes literary texts present and absent at once. On the one hand, overwriting literary texts by hand, she makes them materially and visually present as patterns of handwriting; she creates these texts anew as visual patterns. Paille forges a writing to be looked at rather than a writing to be read. Another way of putting this is to say that Paille is creating texts anew as opaque webs, rather than as ‘see-through’ texts: she is weaving text, through a handwriting that cannot be read, as a visual surface that is ‘just’ a surface, rather than a medium for reading. So, on the other hand, this means that literary texts disappear as text in Paille’s work: they appear as visual artwork to disappear as a matter for reading. How should we read this remove of literature? What does the illegible signal in Paille’s project Livres-livres (1993-2004) – books handwritten and transfigured within books – that came into fruition in an age of digitization and information overload? Using Vilem Flusser’s philosophical work on writing alongside Paille, I show how handwriting morphs into visual rhythms and intensity patterns in Livres-livres: rhythms of lines, ink, and colour, and patterns of interferences that record the interlacing of written and printed text. I then argue that these rhythms and patterns materialize as scores for a diffractive reading of a most radical kind. We are not simply reading one text through another, the one tangled in the other. We are reading this entwinement itself as an intra-medial event.

This article explores Anne Carson's Nox (2010) in the light of remediation. Nox is a book about death and the recording of loss: lost time, a lost brother, and lost presence. It conveys this loss through the logic of hypermediacy and a word-for-word translation of Catullus 101. Nox reworks the materiality of an original notebook, yet hides its paper materiality in the very act of displaying it. It translates every word of Catullus 101 in a separate entry so as to make us aware of the impossibility of a full retrieval of meaning, and ends up making the integral translation entirely illegible. Both hypermediacy and translation, I argue, function as metaphors for the inability of the speaker to represent her deceased brother Michael. Both effectuate a deferral, or screening-out, of presence. This screening out of presence at once affirms the visuality of textuality in Nox: Carson's book revolves around the image of a paper-based text. This dimension of the imaginary in a litera...

Combining a media studies approach with the theoretical framework of new materialism, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth probes how Anne Carson’s folded book Nox puts its own mediality on display to reflect on the intertwining of its material and symbolic dimensions. Brillenburg Wurth shows that Carson simulates the hand-crafted authenticity of artist’s books through the use of technologies like Xeroxing and scanning, aesthetic methods like scrap booking and collage, and poetics that combine (auto)biographical writing with translation. Tracing the US avant-garde context in which Roland Barthes’s seminal essay “The Death of the Author” was first published, Brillenburg Wurth explores how book fictions and quasi-artist’s books like Carson’s Nox reintroduce a concern with authorship to contemporary literature while continuing to champion avant-garde practices of depersonalization.

This book advocates an integrative approach to literature and screen- based media—not only literature and digital media, but also film and television. This comprehensive approach allows us to reassess current remediations of literature in relation to its earlier transformations on screen. Since the early twentieth century, literary genres have been trav- eling across magnetic, wireless, and electronic planes. These travels have changed ‘‘the literary’’ as a heterogeneous field. Literature may be any- thing from acoustic poetry and oral performance to verbal-visual con- stellations in print and on screen, cinematic narratives, and hyperfiction and cell phone novels. New technologies have left their imprint on liter- ature as a paper-based medium, and vice versa. Literature no longer has a single material location, and one may wonder if it ever had one. What, indeed, is the location of literature? In her design for a new comparative literature, Emily Apter has argued for a comparative practice without location, without ‘‘national predicate.’’ Such a practice would rather center on the space and interactions between languages. This volume adds to that project the dimension of intermediality, focus- ing on a literature that has no single material predicate—or at least, a literature that has different material locations, rather than the book and the paper page alone. Our contribution to such a more multidimen- sional comparative literature is to map the ‘‘literary’’ as a mode in between page and screen technologies: books, film, television, and digi- tal media. Our aim is to analyze the interactions between pages and screens during the last three decades, and to thus come to an under- standing of the ways in which pages have operated as screens, and screens in turn have adapted to or resisted the ‘‘tyranny’’ of the page.

of different poetic possibilities. It ranges from simple electronic mimicries of printed text on the internet, poetic spaces on weblogs, and archives of ‘old print’ poetries, to experiments in lettrist shapes and moving images, surround-forms-and-sounds, gnoetry, networked and programmable media in general, and many other modalities. In this essay, I will restrict myself to one ‘current’ of digital poetry, which I would like to call medially complex digital poetry: poetry integrating diverse (simulated) medial layers modulating and transforming into each other. I will take this poetry as my point of departure to explore the relevance of the concepts of the ‘multimedial’ and the ‘intermedial’ to the poetic-digital domain. While ‘multimediality’ and ‘intermediality’ are often used interchangeably, there is a significant difference between them that is already announced in the prefixes ‘multi’ (many) and ‘inter’ (between). I will argue that intermediality is the more appropriate tool o...

This chapter demonstrates how the concept of the cinematographic works as a literary concept in modernist and postmodernist fictions. In Shoot! the cinematographic becomes the framework for rethinking the relations between humans and machines, as the literary and the cinematographic affect and contaminate each other. Likewise, in Gravity's Rainbow the cinematographic and the novelistic, and all the values attached to both, spill over into each other, further destabilizing ontological differences between 'real' and 'mediated' worlds, as these worlds interact with, and collapse into each other.

This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explains why literature has been interpreted in different ways across time. Finally, it asks why some texts fascinate people so much that they are reproduced and passed on to others in the form of new editions, in adaptations to film and theatre, and, last but not least, in the ways we look at the world and act out our lives. The Life of Texts is designed around particular issues rather than the history of the discipline as such. Each chapter concentrates on a different aspect of 'the life of texts' and introduces the key debates and concepts relevant to its study. The issues discussed range from aesthetics and narrative to intert...

In the introduction to this special issue I investigate the feasibility of a material turn in comparative literature. I approach this turn in the sense of the Greek kronos: as a circular, not linear, movement. I propose that this material turn has materialized in the practice and criticism of artists’ books; the study of comparative textual media; research in avant-garde poetry; and a line of criticism incorporating memory studies and book as well as paper history. Through an intermedial analysis of Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” I show that the material turn in comparative literature emerges out of—rather than against—what is perceived to be its oppositional figure: poststructuralist thought and the linguistic turn. This insight urges us to reconsider the material turn not as a new development in the history of the humanities, but as a set of ongoing concerns, insights, and methods across time.

In this introductory article to the special issue, I explore the trope of paradox to think through the ideaof creativity. Traditionally, metaphor has been the favored trope to conceptualize creativity: the combinationof two existing elements into something different, something new. In this special issue, we focus on thetrope of paradox as a trope defined by juxtaposition and an apparently irresolvable conflict to delineate cre-ativity. Glossing the usefulness of paradox for artistic as well as scientific creativity, I show how the idea ofJanusian thinking or being in two minds holds great potential to bridge creativity research in the humanitiesand social sciences. This issue starts building that bridge with multidisciplinary perspectives on creativitythat, first, deconstruct apparent dichotomies in creativity research and, second, approach creativity as a situ-ated, distributed concept

Part 1 Mediality, Digitality, Subjectivity Chapter 1 Samuel Weber "Medium, Reflexivity, and the Economy of the Self" Chapter 2 Anthony Curtis Adler "Analog in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Audiophilia, Semi-Aura, and the Cultural Memory of the Phonograph" Chapter 3 Joanna Zylinksa "What if Foucault Had Had a Blog?" Chapter 4 Kiene Brillenburg Wurth "Posthuman Selves, Assembled Textualities: Remediated Print in the Digital Age" Part 2 Digital Refexivities: Prose, Poetry, Code Chapter 5 Katherine Hayles "Intermediation: the Pursuit of a Vision" Chapter 6 Marie-Laure Ryan "Net.art: Dysfunctionality and Self-Reflexivity" Chapter 7 Katalin Sandor "Moving (the) Text: From Print to the Visual" Chapter 8 Federica Frabetti "Technology Made Legible" Part 3 Intermedial Reflexivities: Film, Writing, Script Chapter 9 Peter Verstraeten "Cinema as a Digest of Literature: A 'Remedy' Against Adaptation Fever" Chapter 10 Lovorka Gruic, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth "Cinematography as a Literary Concept in the (Post)Modern Age: Pirandello to Pynchon" Chapter 11 Jan Baetens "Novelizing Tati" Chapter 12 Martijn Engelberts "Copycat-and -Mouse: the Printed Screenplay and the Literary Field in France" Part 4 New Literacies, Education, and Accessibility Chapter 13 William Uricchio "The New Literacies. Technology and Cultural Form" Chapter 14 Asuncion Lopez Varela "Posthuman Inscriptions & Humachine Environments: Visibility, Blogging and the Construction of Subjectivity in Educational Spaces" Chapter 15 Gary Hall "The Singularity of New Media"

This book advocates an integrative approach to literature and screen- based media—not only literature and digital media, but also film and television. This comprehensive approach allows us to reassess current remediations of literature in relation to its earlier transformations on screen. Since the early twentieth century, literary genres have been trav- eling across magnetic, wireless, and electronic planes. These travels have changed ‘‘the literary’’ as a heterogeneous field. Literature may be any- thing from acoustic poetry and oral performance to verbal-visual con- stellations in print and on screen, cinematic narratives, and hyperfiction and cell phone novels. New technologies have left their imprint on liter- ature as a paper-based medium, and vice versa. Literature no longer has a single material location, and one may wonder if it ever had one.
What, indeed, is the location of literature? In her design for a new comparative literature, Emily Apter has argued for a comparative practice without location, without ‘‘national predicate.’’ Such a practice would rather center on the space and interactions between languages. This volume adds to that project the dimension of intermediality, focus- ing on a literature that has no single material predicate—or at least, a literature that has different material locations, rather than the book and the paper page alone. Our contribution to such a more multidimen- sional comparative literature is to map the ‘‘literary’’ as a mode in between page and screen technologies: books, film, television, and digi- tal media. Our aim is to analyze the interactions between pages and screens during the last three decades, and to thus come to an under- standing of the ways in which pages have operated as screens, and screens in turn have adapted to or resisted the ‘‘tyranny’’ of the page.

In this chapter I trace the concept of the satirical grotesque in Absolutely Fabulous. I show how the female body as a materialization of the grotesque in Absolutely Fabulous relates to the power of satire as an instrument of deface- ment and attack. Absolutely Fabulous is a comically revised sitcom, in its almost women-only cast and its subversion of gender roles. As ridicule of glamour, fashion, and design, one of the main issues in the series is consumption and dieting, incontinence and discipline. I analyze how the satirical grotesque mani- fests itself in the two protagonists of the show, Edina and Patsy, in between these somatic extremes of incontinence and discipline. More specifically, I show how the satirical grotesque works in Absolutely Fabulous as a disruption of carefully designed images of smooth and firm bodiliness in our culture: a disruption of the real.

... We might call this the sublime as inspiration. (The Dutch philosopher Rene´e van de Vall has pursued this ''branch'' of the sublime in her book on Barnett Newman, re-presenting the experience of the sublime as an experience of one's own creativity.)21 However, though ...